ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors trace how one of the world's largest and fastest supercomputers becomes a polished report that can circulate the hallways of Washington, DC. The supercomputer has nodes that are dedicated to monitoring the machine so that computing power is not robbed from the jobs that are running. The authors use language to trace, and thereby enact, the network for their own explanatory purposes: to answer the question of how X became Y. Latourian ethnography, however, teaches people how to do this imaginatively by compressing multitudinous points of view into the singular voice of the network. The authors understand the value and significance of what technical communicators, and knowledge workers more generally, do on a moment-to-moment basis. The practice of compression and travel, however contrived, has the potential to change how we understand the value and significance of what technical communicators, and knowledge workers more generally, do on a moment-to-moment basis.
